Auqib Nabi is the uncapped Jammu and Kashmir seamer India have called into their Test squad after ruling Jasprit Bumrah out of the Sri Lanka series with a lingering left knee problem. He earns his first senior call-up on the back of back-to-back outstanding Ranji Trophy seasons, including sixty wickets in 2025-26 that made him the format’s leading wicket-taker. Nabi is also the first cricketer from Jammu and Kashmir to reach a Test squad on merit alone. His inclusion says as much about Bumrah’s fragility as it does about his own rise.
BCCI’s Official Selection Announcement
The BCCI’s media advisory landed on the third of August, confirming that Bumrah has not recovered from the left knee injury he picked up during the ODI series in England and will miss the Sri Lanka Tests entirely. The selection committee turned to Nabi as his direct replacement, handing the Jammu and Kashmir quick his maiden call-up to the senior side.
The board’s statement also flagged that Sai Sudharsan’s place in the squad still depends on a fitness check, a reminder that this Test series has already been shaped by injuries before a ball has been bowled. For Nabi, the timing could barely have been better, arriving on the back of the two most productive first-class seasons of his career.
India’s think tank had already been managing a leaky pace attack even before this news, with Washington Sundar, Harshit Rana, Nitish Kumar Reddy and Akash Deep all missing through various injuries heading into the tour.
Auqib Nabi India Test call-up for Bumrah Injury
Nabi’s route to the senior team runs directly through Ranji Trophy performances that were hard to ignore. He took sixty wickets in ten matches during the 2025-26 season, the most by any bowler that year, and followed seven separate five-wicket hauls with an economy and strike rate that ranked among the best returned by any bowler in a single first-class season in the country.
A season earlier he had taken forty-four wickets, and the combined tally across both campaigns sits at one hundred and four scalps from eighteen matches at an average of 13.14. Only a handful of bowlers in the competition’s history have managed anything close across two consecutive seasons, and Nabi is now the first player from his home region to top the national wicket-taking charts.
The Numbers Behind the Selection
Zoom out to his full first-class career and the shape of the selection becomes clearer still. He has taken one hundred and fifty-six wickets from just forty-one matches at an average of 18.37, with sixteen five-wicket hauls and four match hauls of ten wickets or more. He also picked up six wickets in two matches on a recent India A tour of Sri Lanka.
He is twenty-nine, goes by the nickname Baramulla Express, and follows Parvez Rasool and Umran Malik as only the third player from his region to reach India’s senior setup, though the first to do it in the Test format. Selectors clearly valued proven volume over reputation once Bumrah’s fitness became a real concern.
That combination of volume, consistency and a home board keen to reward domestic form gave the selectors little reason to look elsewhere once Bumrah’s fitness update arrived from Bengaluru.
A Long History of Fitness Concerns
Bumrah’s knee trouble first surfaced during this year’s T20 World Cup and never fully went away. He returned for the ODI series in England in July, his first international cricket in close to two years, but picked up an impact injury to the same knee while fielding in the second match at Cardiff.
He missed the third ODI at Lord’s, and scans later in July showed the soreness had not cleared, leading to an injection to manage the inflammation. He was still named in the original squad for Sri Lanka subject to fitness, but the assessment in Bengaluru ultimately went against him.
It fits a pattern that has followed Bumrah since his 2022 back stress fracture, with team management repeatedly forced to manage his workload with caution to protect his long-term future. That caution is exactly why Auqib Nabi’s India Test call-up for Bumrah’s injury has become the story of this squad, with two Tests in Galle and Colombo now arriving without their most important bowler.